


In Her Own Country

by frith_in_thorns



Category: Shadows of the Apt - Adrian Tchaikovsky
Genre: Angst, F/M, Homecoming, Missing Scene, Road Trip
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-09
Updated: 2016-03-09
Packaged: 2018-05-25 19:12:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,255
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6207091
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/frith_in_thorns/pseuds/frith_in_thorns
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A missing scene for the epilogue. (Spoilers up to the end of book 10.)</p><p>The journey back to Collegium takes longer than Che intended.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Her Own Country

Che had imagined for more than three years just how it would feel to at last stand in the open air again, so it seemed rather unfair that she should in actual fact greet the world with an involuntary and extremely undignified squeak.

It was so _bright_. Indescribably, unbelievably bright. Che had been very sensibly conditioning herself by staring into the brightest fires she could find, but at some point during their underground sojourn she had lost the ability to accurately compare the Worm's domain to the world above. In the endless dank gloom her memories had dulled and dimmed without her noticing.

She rubbed her watering eyes, finally resorting to squinting through a tiny chink in her fingers. Even that narrow view was painfully dazzling. 

"Are you all right?" Messel asked. He sounded concerned.

"Yes," Che said, though gritted teeth. She hadn't heard any embarrassing yelps from Thalric, which made her even more determined to get her eyes open as quickly as possible.

As the blinding _brightness_ of everything began, finally, to dissipate, she began to make out colours. She didn't dare look at the sky yet, but beneath her feet was solid, genuine Lowlands soil. Except that in her memories soil had been a dingy, dull brown, barely worth looking at, and this was… Well, if she was honest, it _was_ brown, but that hardly did it justice. And it was encroached upon by vibrant, vivid green — blades of grass which stabbed up towards the light, and tiny plants with leaves that seemed too small and finely detailed to be real.

"I believe you said you were taking us to Collegium," Thalric said, dryly.

Che dragged her gaze from the green growing things at her feet and towards her husband. _He_ was managing not to look either overawed or blinded, but he did at least have a hand shading his eyes from the sunlight. "No, I said near Collegium," she corrected him. "You agreed we didn't want to get squashed by an automotive two seconds after appearing in the middle of a road."

"That's true, but I didn't realise _near_ was such a relative term." Thalric's dry sarcasm would have been deeply annoying just then if Che wasn't well aware of how unsettling he found travelling by magic. He was overcompensating desperately to try and seem at ease. "Do you, for instance, know in which direction we should start walking?"

"Oh." It was finally possible for Che to look at the horizon without wincing. The blue sky was marvellously clear, and for a moment she was in danger of getting completely distracted by the sight of it. But the rolling plains of the Lowlands reminded her what she was supposed to be looking for. She turned a slow circle. There was a cluster of abandoned and fallen-into-disrepair farmhouses not far away, but no walled city was within sight.

She finished her fruitless survey of their surrounds by looking at Messel. The blind Cricket-kinden had his head tilted back, letting the sun shine fully on his eyeless face. His mouth was open, as if to better taste this new air. Struck by that idea, Che inhaled deeply, rolling it across her tongue. It tasted dry, and dusty, with a hint of pollen tickling the back of her throat. Mostly, it was the absences she noticed — no damp, no mould, no fungal spores. 

And, of course, there was the magic. It was creeping slowly back into the Worm's prison, trickling through every crack she had forced open during three long years, but now it felt like an extra layer of light and warmth lying over her skin.

"I'm going to fly up and scout around," Thalric said, having taken Che's long silence as an acknowledgement of their being hopelessly lost. Which was not entirely fair but also not entirely wrong — she had forgotten to think about it. He launched himself into the sky without waiting for an answer, Art-wings leaping from his shoulders, and Che suspected his offer had been at least partly out of a desire to recapture the much-missed sky.

Messel visibly started as Thalric's feet left the earth. "Is it safe?" he asked, nervously.

"Perfectly safe," Che assured him, although for Messel the idea of being suspended in the air, cut off from the vibrations which provided his awareness of the world around him, must be the worst kind of hell. "He's more dangerous than anything else in the sky." They had begun to make a dent in the underworld's population of terrifying flying beasts, but it would still be a long time before anyone down there took to their wings for anything but dire necessity.

Messel rolled his shoulders and hummed in his equivalent of a nod. He turned his face upwards again. "Is that the sun? That fire up above? Does it go out?"

Che almost laughed, and managed just in time not to. _Remember how ignorant we were underground at first,_ she chided herself. "It is the sun, and it doesn't go out," she said. "It's only there during the day, though. At night it's gone — I mean, we rotate, and…" She trailed off in a flurry of confusion, irritated with herself at having tried to reach for an explanation filled with forces and Apt calculations which she had learnt as a child and was now lost beyond her understanding. 

Thalric returned to earth with a thud that spoke of his lack of recent practice while Messel was still pondering Che's non-explanation and Che was trying to work out a better one. "I hope you're both prepared for a long walk," he said.

Che sighed. "How far?"

Thalric pointed. "I could see Collegium in the distance. At least, I assume it's Collegium. It could just as easily be Helleron, or the city with that mad butterfly in charge."

Che wanted to say something in defence of her skills, but she couldn't summon up much confidence in them herself just then. "I hope we don't arrive too late to join the Assembly," she said.

"There's a road a couple of miles or so away," Thalric said. "I don't know if it goes to our mystery city or not, but we might be lucky."

"This way," Che said to Messel, tapping a hand against his shoulder to show him. "And it _is_ Collegium, don't listen to Thalric. The landscape's all wrong for anywhere else. I'm sorry about the walk, though."

"It's interesting," Messel said, as they set off. "The ground is so different. I can place you with my ears, but my feet think you're further away."

"You might like it better in the cities," Che said. "Those are all paved with stone, so it might feel more familiar."

"I'll get used to it," Messel said, with a smile. Che liked his rare smiles. They were all for him; not concerned with the viewer at all. 

"An excellent thing about cities is the range of civilised transport options available," Thalric mused a while later, seemingly to himself. 

Che rolled her eyes, but privately agreed with him. Their thick clothing, vital for the dank cold of the underground cavern, was uncomfortably warm under the sun's relentless glare. Che was getting a headache, and she could see Thalric's pale skin already beginning to redden. Worst of all, they hadn't brought supplies, not anticipating this trek. 

The road, when they reached it, was a welcome relief by then from the uneven dirt, so strange to walk on when ones' muscles were used to rock. By contrast, the compacted flatness of its surface was as miraculous as the greatest architecture of Khanaphes. Even Messel halted, tapping his heel against it to examine it. Then he made a startled noise. "What's coming?"

Thalric's hands shot up into a defensive position, before he forcibly made himself relax. Still, he remained tense as the automiton-pulled cart creaked around a bend towards them. Che, too, was nervous. What sort of reaction did a Wasp get in the Lowlands these days?

Still, after meeting each others' eyes, they waved it down, and the driver pulled up with no signs of alarm. She was an elderly Beetle who goggled at them quite unashamedly. "You after a lift?" she asked.

"If you're heading towards Collegium, we'd be very grateful for one," Thalric said.

"Mmhmm." She squinted at Che. "You an artificer, girl? Know about clockwork?"

Che shook her head regretfully. "I'm sorry, but no."

The Beetle-kinden shrugged philosophically. "Eh, well. The back's empty, so you may as well hop up. I'm Elta."

There was plenty of space for them to sit on the wooden planks, bracing whenever a wheel hit a pothole. The cargo was restricted to one steel box, which Elta instructed them strictly not to touch. Che suspected illicit dealings, but of the more benign sort.

Messel was clearly unhappy about the transport, although he didn't complain. Soon he began exploring the grain of the wood with his fingers in evident fascination.

Che leaned against Thalric, and he put an arm around her comfortably. "Sorry for the detour," she murmured.

She felt his laugh rumble through his chest. "Life with you is an endless series of detours, Cheerwell. I've learned to accept that."

It was too true. She had never intended to be away from home for this long, but there had always been something else to do, and somehow there had never been _time_ …

"You come far?" Elta demanded suddenly. She sniffed. "You look foreign."

"We've been to the Commonweal," Thalric said, before anyone else could offer an overly-complicated answer.

It seemed to satisfy Elta. "Ah. Strange folk there. You'll be glad being back in proper places." She eyed Messel, but clearly her idea of the Commonweal encompassed folk far stranger than him, because she turned back to watching the articulated motion of the clockwork pulling them along.

Che watched the countryside; the familiar rolling hills of the Lowlands made strange and new by all the years lying between her last sight of them. All the shades of brown and green she had entirely forgotten, and the blue sky reaching and deepening above them. No roof, ever.

She slept without meaning to, lulled by the rocking motion of the cart, and so missed the sight she had been waiting for of the walls of Collegium rising up out of the fields. They were already rattling under the gate when the noise of a city's population around them woke her up.

"Are we there?" she asked, blearily. It was evening, but the sun must have been shining full on her face for a while, as her skin felt stretched and tight, and her head hurt. 

"See for yourself," Thalric said, shaking out the arm she had been using as a pillow while she sat upright and tried to get her hair to flatten down.

Her heart twisted as she looked around. It was Collegium… and it wasn't. She knew about its occupation by the Empire's forces, and she had been half-prepared to see the devastation from the war still evident, but three years was apparently more than long enough for the industrious residents to remove such obvious scarring. For a newcomer to the city, the only evidence would be in the newness of particular buildings. For someone who had lived out her childhood here, it was far more than that. The layout of entire streets had changed; they had new names, and led in new directions. Some narrow alleys were widened, and houses had been built entirely across where entrances to other ones had been. Che recognised the signature of a committee determined not just to reconstruct but to _improve_ ; to seize the opportunity to shape a more efficient city for a modern age. 

Really, she should have expected it. She had, after all, grown up among Forum radicals.

"I'm stopping here," Elta said, as they pulled into a foundry district. The acrid tang of smoke and hot metal bit into the back of Che's throat, and as the clockwork pulling the cart juddered to an uneven halt she could hear gears grinding within the sheds, hammers striking, voices shouting to be heard above the clatter and clang.

"Che?" Thalric said, and she realised that he and Elta were looking at her expectantly. "Do we need directions?"

"No, I'm fine," she said, paying less attention to their words than to the sounds and smells enveloping her. _Home,_ they told her, and no matter how strong the fact of her Inaptness, the associations they stirred in her remained.

"You _do_ know where we're going, don't you?" Thalric asked, once they had said their thanks and goodbyes to Elta and struck out for themselves.

Che didn't answer immediately, busy trying to reconcile her memory of the city's layout with all its changes. And what if the _Assembly_ wasn't in the same place? 

Lamps were being lit, illuminating the streets with wide swathes of light and turning the darkening sky black in contrast. It was all impressively modern. "This way, I think," she decided.

Her home might have changed drastically, but she could always count on Thalric's scepticism of any decision he hadn't made personally. He conveyed it to her now with nothing more than his facial expression.

She tended to find it reassuring. She was unlikely to end up like a long-ago magicians whose power convinced them they were the closest thing to gods as long as she had a husband who was willing to look at her like that. 

Buoyant with that thought, she began walking. "What do you think of Collegium so far, Messel?" she asked, cheerfully.

"I like the stone," Messel said. "It's good and solid. There are fewer people than I was expecting, though."

"They're mostly in their homes at this time," Che said. "When the sun's hidden, it's night, which is cold and dark. Most people only go around in the day."

He considered. "Will their Speaker want to see us now?"

"The Forum business happens at all hours, especially around such an important event as this Assembly," Che said. Honesty compelled her to add, "Besides, we haven't got any money, and if they won't see us now they should at least give us somewhere to sleep."

Thalric snorted. Che ignored him, and Messel diplomatically didn't comment.

The roads had changed, but they still eventually led to the Amphitheatre. Che stopped short and drew in her breath once they were close enough to see what was lit by lamplight. The once-beautiful architecture was reduced to jumbled stone. "Surely they should have rebuilt this?" she asked the air. She could hardly believe that it had been destroyed — huge slabs of cut stone, dragged into place by the back-breaking labour of uncounted numbers of slaves, now scattered as if some child had kicked over their toy blocks.

Thalric took her hand. She held onto him for a moment, needing his strength. She _knew_ about the siege and occupation of Collegium from information brought back by scouts, but she hadn't realised until just then that it had still been something abstract and not quite real for her. Just like she had learned about the death in battle of Stenwold Maker, but it had seemed impossible that it should be _true_. And now she was standing in her own city and witnessing the war-wounds with her own eyes, but her uncle wasn't here to welcome her home. He would never walk these streets again, and nor would so many others she had known and loved.

"I'm fine," she whispered, once she had collected herself. Thalric squeezed her hand tightly before letting her go.

The lights were all on inside Speaker Leadwell's offices. Che rapped firmly on the door. 

"I'm home," she murmured while they waited, just to hear it aloud, and she was speaking as much to the door itself as to her companions; to the lintel cut from solid Collegium stone and the wood traded for with some other nation and fashioned into a workmanlike door by the machinery of artifice. She glanced to her husband, instinctively wanting to include him in this feeling

But although Thalric was beside her, he _wasn't_ home — she didn't think there was even a place which still constituted that for him any more. Messel was as far from his home as he had ever been. And it was him and his people that they were here for, not for some sentimental ideal of hers. 

The Dragonfly-kinden who opened the door was warlike in a way that was reassuring in its familiarity. She didn't unsling her bow, but it was very obviously ready to leap into her hand at a moment's notice. "Business hours are over," she said.

"We're here on diplomacy, not business," Che said. "Delegates for the Assembly of Nations."

The Dragonfly's eyes flicked over her dismissively, narrowed at Thalric, and widened in surprise at Messel. It had occurred to Che how useful his distinctive appearance might be in short-cutting questions about the legitimacy of their claim to be representing a previously unknown nation, and she was satisfied to be right. 

"Sorry for arriving so late," she added, because she was, after all, still Cheerwell Maker, and had walked through enough fire to be unashamed of it.

"You'd better come in, I suppose," the Dragonfly said. Her eyes kept tracking suspiciously back to Thalric. It reminded Che painfully of Sten, and how the war in Myna had never been over for him. She wondered if they had known each other. Her throat burned with questions, but it wasn't the time. 

The Fly who buzzed into the entrance hall alarmed Messel — his head jerked up sharply at the sound of his wings, but he suppressed the motion almost immediately. Che felt a start of surprise too at the familiar features of the man. She had begun to be almost resigned to everything being different, but she had seen him in the offices of the Assembly Speaker for as long as she had lived in Collegium, without ever knowing his name. One of those faces so ubiquitous as to be part of the background. He showed not the least recognition of her, but then importance hadn't gone both ways. He began a whispered argument with the Dragonfly, which Che bore patiently. Then he gave her a sharp, direct look, and she felt his sudden recognition hit her like a fist. 

"I'll get Speaker Leadwell," he said, abruptly.

The Dragonfly pulled an irritated face at him, but he was already moving. That ruthless efficiency which had so annoyed Sten on occasion. Che smiled.

"I'm still not convinced you're not spies," the Dragonfly said.

Thalric rolled his eyes. "My wife insisted on making a quiet entrance, but I really don't think Stenwold Maker's niece and ward should be accused of spying in her own city."

That had all the effect which Thalric desired and Che didn't. The Dragonfly froze. "Cheerwell?" she asked, uncertainly. "Aren't you dead?"

Che was sure she heard Thalric and possibly Messel suppress a laugh. She herself, though, felt her eyes sting. She had come home to find herself a ghost.

The Fly was back. "Speaker Leadwell will see you," he intoned; redundant, since the man himself was following.

And yet, still feeling lost and ghost-like, Che found as always that the core of her was strong and steady. Thalric and Messel were waiting, deferring to her. She felt the approving pressure of their presence. 

She stepped forward. Cleared her throat. Began to speak.


End file.
